NVIDIA has done pretty well on the mobile market with its Tegra 3 processor, and it should be of no surprise to anyone that NVIDIA has been working on the next generation Tegra processor. The company even provided some rough details early last year.

However, some detailed information on the next-generation 28nm Tegra 4 leaked today, and it promises six times the power of Tegra 3. Tegra 4 appears to be, according to a leaked slide, a 4+1 quad-core design similar to that of the current Tegra 3. The Cortex-A15-based Tegra 4 has 72 graphics cores and supports dual channel memory. Tegra 4 will also support resolutions of 2560 x 1440 for encode and decode and promises very low power consumption.

Other supported features will include the USB 3.0, making this the first NVIDIA chipset to support the new and faster USB standard.

With CES 2013 kicking off in mere weeks, we should have significantly more details coming in the not-too-distant future.

quote: ARM and similar SOCs are not equivalent to *today's* mid to high end desktop processors.

Yes, but we were not talking about today's ARM processors. Plus the speculation is that ARM x64 will be a significant jump in performance that hopefully fit into the low-end PC arena.

The market is definitely being pushed from both ends requiring more performance with less heat and power costs. There hasn't been processor to fit that mark yet, however the ARM processor is close without having all the legacy code. I speculate that we will see a performance jump next year in ARM that will make it the perfect processor for Windows RT devices and will meet the demands for most people.

Face it.. now almost everyone and their dogs has a tablet (my dog has one, she watches snoopy) and the number of cycles coming from the "legacy" desktops and laptops for those families has dropped drastically. If I could get the web apps my daughter uses for school to work on android she wouldn't ever need to use her desktop (however parental controls suck, so she is banned from using the tablet).

Intel will likely become sufficiently power efficient before ARM meets any current gen Intel performance benchmark. 64-bit isn't going to boost performance that much, unless I missed something when Intel did the same.

Yes, mobile devices are out and about certianly not going anywhere. Arm is great for light workloads, especially battery powered. ARM would have to revolutionize at a pace faster than Intel's slowest pace to win out in the server space though.

As for PC replacements, ya ARM could have a place. It's so cheap. But, there's a reason for that too..

If you're not talking about today's processors, why do you ignore advancements by other companies? AMD is getting its APU package down to less than 20 watts, and intel has already produced an Atom chip running similarly to an snapdragon core (though core count still limited) at similar draw without finfet.

The claims of gloom and doom over conventional x86 parts are highly exaggerated. The industry isn't some kind of bubble where only one standard can succeed without the entire business popping. 10 years ago the death of x86 would've made significantly more sense considering the node sizes, but now its becoming less and less influential to draw.